The invention addresses the problem of removing random noise (“static”) in the video signals produced by webcams. In real time communication systems video communication over a private or a public IP network is done by capturing video and audio through a capturing device such as a webcam at each end-point (e.g. participants in a peer-to-peer call or participants in a multi-party conference). The electronics in a camera inherently add noise to the video frames. As a result, the video may not look clean and the video compression engine responsible for compressing the video before it is transmitted over the IP network may end up spending bits inefficiently on encoding noise.
Traditional temporal video filtering approaches are based on parametric/threshold-based techniques where the power of the noise needs to be known. These techniques typically compute standard deviation or local variation between pixels (e.g. in one color channel) in sequential frames attempting to detect “changes” in content within a predefined block. If the change (based on the set threshold) is there, the block is not filtered, because it belongs to a moving foreground.
The challenge with the above described approaches is that they are parametric, i.e. they rely on predefined thresholds. Thus, it becomes difficult to deal with different levels of inherently generated noise.